Maps and mappers of the 2018 calendar: Kate Keeley

Q: Tell us about yourself.

A: I always thought I was going to be a scientist and had a brief stint as researcher and field biologist. Then I decided I liked communicating science to the public more, and worked as an interpretive park ranger and zoo education specialist. And then I discovered GIS and the rest was history. With GIS, I found a tool that combined my technical side with my eye for design and an opportunity to communicate complex subjects in new and innovative ways.

A recent master’s graduate from the University of Michigan, I now work as a GIS consultant for an environmental consulting firm in Michigan and I couldn’t be happier. Say hi to @pokateo_ on Twitter (that’s po-kate-o like potato. Get it? I like potatoes)! Or mosey over to my website at https://kateberg.github.io/ to learn more about my journey.

Q: Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know).

A: I stumbled across the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being reports and immediately thought of making a map using a scale of happy to sad faces (sort of inspired by recently reading John Nelson’s suggestion in his latest ArcGIS blog post to use Chernoff faces for symbology). A quick Google search of PNG faces led me immediately to a bunch of cutouts of celebrity faces and I knew that’s what I wanted to use. I found faces with a variety of different emotions, from smiling to meh to frowning to crying and played around with a scale that made sense to me.

Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.

A: I worked in ArcGIS Pro. I used my cubic tessellations I created for another project (also inspired by John Nelson. This time his Electo-Cubo-Grams) as the base (that was a whole other challenge; trying to fit all the states into a general US shape was quite difficult). With my base layers from that project, each state had its own point. Then, I uploaded the face PNGs as the point symbology for each state and went from there.

I was really excited by how it was shaping up, but I shared it with a couple of friends and they weren’t too keen on it. They said it [was] actually quite frightening:

(https://kateberg.github.io/img/Wellbeing/wellbeing1.png)

They said I should stop what I was doing and burn it with fire.

I was undeterred. Perhaps I was blind or a bit abstracted, but I still thought what I was doing was pretty cool.

I played with different ways to make the heads less creepy:

https://kateberg.github.io/img/Wellbeing/wellbeing2.png

https://kateberg.github.io/img/Wellbeing/wellbeing3.png

https://kateberg.github.io/img/Wellbeing/wellbeing4.png

https://kateberg.github.io/img/Wellbeing/wellbeing5.png

I noticed that the overall pattern of states’ well-being changed depending on the component (e.g. purpose, social, financial), so I wanted to find a way to include those patterns, without making the map look extra complicated (or creepy as it were). I found using the colored circles on the right to be a great way to provide a quick glance of the interesting patterns! Overall, I think the final result came out pretty neat and I’m very proud of it being selected for the GeoHipster Calendar!  You can read more at: https://kateberg.github.io/portfolio/wellbeing.html